Now on to the important stuff! Regards punctuation, I'm at a loss on this one, as other than ASCII, I've no way of entering the mystery marks into the message. Perhaps you may mean my overuse of HTML? Things like mdash, hellip, ldquo and rdquo with the occasional ndash are pretty much second nature to me. Note that here I've used them without the preceding ampersand and the trailing semi-colon. If these show up as question marks then maybe I can use you as a g-pig to test the numeric version to see if that works on your side of the fence? Could you try adding the decoration to this stuff in your environment and see what happens?

–hsm

"Never try to teach a pig to sing…it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

You're right, your HTML is the display problem for me. I use
Konqueror (from KDE), which seems not to
believe in some of the HTML entities you're fond of.
I'll have to take this up with w3c.org and/or KDE.